CANT BOOT!!!

[Michael J. Lynch]

Charles Malespin wrote:
> 
> 
> On 10/11/05, *Michael J. Lynch* <mlynch at gcom.com 
> <mailto:mlynch at gcom.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Charles Malespin wrote:
>      >
>      >
>      > On 10/11/05, *Matt Patterson* <matt at v8zman.com
>     <mailto:matt at v8zman.com> <mailto:matt at v8zman.com
>     <mailto:matt at v8zman.com>>>
>      > wrote:
>      >
>      >     It sounds like you have a disk that has failed, but based on
>     your recent
>      >     upgrade I would be very suspicious of that too. Are you able
>     to stick
>      >     the drive in an external enclosure or another computer to see
>     if it can
>      >     be read elsewhere?
>      >
>      >
>      > I cant take the drive out at all.  I tried messing with it more, and
>      > upon another hard reboot it allowed me to get into windows.  Unfort.
>      > Windows is screwed cause I hadnt been there in a while doing
>     security
>      > upgrades, so now IE wont work and I cant access the internet.  So
>     that
>      > side is worthless.  I can also boot into rescue mode, but it
>     keeps saying
>      > Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
>      > current sda : sense key Medium error
>      > Additional sense: Address mark not found for data field
>      > end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 289905801
>      > (among a long list of other things)
>      > root at none :
>      >
>      >
>      > Is there anyway to salvage this or am I just doomed?
>      >
> 
>     Looks like your doomed.  This is mostly likely a drive or controller
>     failure.  If you can, try a different SCSI controller.
> 
>     <snip>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Well if I am doomed, whats to prevent this from happening again?  I mean 
> if I reinstall, that wont fix anything will it?  Is there anything I can 
> do to check or fix this so that it wont happen on my new install?  I 
> would hate for this to keep happeneing.  Someone in another forum 
> suggested booting with a live CD and then doing fsck to see what 
> happens...  Will this work.  i just want to make sure that if I do HAVE 
> to reinstall that I wont run into this problem again right away. 
> 
> 


The errors you are getting are because the *low* level format of
the device has either been corrupted and/or the drive electronics and/or
the controller electronics are failing in some way.  It is extremely
rare for a controller to go west (unless it took a line hit, E.G.
lightning) so my first guess would be the drive itself.  There is no
way to recover the low level format and/or recover from a hardware
failure (unless your running a RAID).

Either way, hardware (probably the disk drive) needs to be replaced.
You can try the fsck from a bootable CD suggestion but I suspect all
you'll end up doing is see'ing the same errors.  If not, I guess it is
possible that somehow your SCSI device drivers got corrupted.



-- 
Michael J. Lynch

What if the hokey pokey IS what it's all about -- author unknown